


A welcome arrow

by 1001cranes



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Alternate Universe - Regency, Arranged Marriage, First Kiss, First Time, M/M, Not!Fic, Pining, Regency, Regency Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-18
Updated: 2012-11-18
Packaged: 2017-11-18 23:10:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,590
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/566301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/1001cranes/pseuds/1001cranes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The wedding is small and grim, because Stiles is being carted off to parts unknown, married to a thirty-something year old dude who wants to marry a seventeen year old dude - totally not creepy <i>at all</i>.</p>
<p>Regency AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. -

**Author's Note:**

> Cleaned up tumblr not!fic. Obviously in no way historically accurate. Just for funsies.
> 
> **Warnings** \- Underage sex, insomuch as Stiles is seventeen, and Peter is in his thirties.
> 
> A LITTLE BACKGROUND, MAESTRO: Peter and Stiles are getting married because the Hales and Stiles’s mother were very close, once upon a time; because they think it's what she would have wanted - well, she probably would have preferred Laura, but everyone’s dead, and Derek has fucked off to the Continent in a storm of angst, and Stiles is getting older and poorer and - oh, right - _poorer_ , so Peter offers.

Their first night together is very nearly a disaster. 

Peter thinks it would be best to get it over with, to get it done with and move on with their lives. He knows they haven’t married for love or anything like it – that he’s barely more than a monster, as scarred as he is, as old as he is – and Stiles wears his emotions on his face. The grim acceptance, the not-quite cruelty in the way he looks at the scars. He’s too curious for true cruelty, too young, and that makes Peter uncomfortable too; how attractive he finds Stiles, at first glance - the lithe slim boy that is his husband. 

And Stiles is a boy really. Seventeen, and now he has a husband, my god, a grown man in his bed, between his legs, gooseflesh popping up all over them. Peter is prepping him – slowly, thoroughly; he doesn’t want to hurt Stiles – but it’s so desperately removed, so clinical, that Stiles says, “stop, please,” in a strangled little voice he barely believes is his.

There’s a flurry of hurt, then – of anger and angst and fear, the whole thing a half-second away from being ruined entirely, but – 

“I’ve never been kissed,” Stiles stutters out. “Not properly, I mean – and I can’t just lie back silently and think of England, okay, it’s just not in my nature.” 

Peter is stunned into silence. Not only from what Stiles has told him, but the initial hurt, the terrible hurt that is being ugly, contemptible, rejected. When he finds his voice, he asks, “would you like a kiss, then?” He can’t deny the burn of that, the sweet agony that starts to lick over his veins. To be Stiles’s first kiss. To take something so much more than innocence.

Stiles’s face burns. It always does when he’s embarrassed. He thinks… of course he thinks of saying _not from you_ , but there are no other takes, are there, no one but his _husband_ ; who isn’t so ugly, with the shadows softening the lines of his face. Not any sort of big bad monster when he’s scarcely taller than Stiles, it at all; who has bright and clever eyes, quick hands, whose voice never wavered once when they took their vows; who married a penniless nobody, for nothing more than honor. He’s heard of stranger matches, hasn’t he? By all accounts his mother should never have married his father – a duke’s daughter and a bow street runner – think nothing of a guileless young man and a half-crazed widower. 

“Yes,” Stiles says, and lifts his chin just a fraction. But that chin trembles, slightly, and Peter has to force himself to breathe deeply, and wait. To tilt Stiles’s face upwards, just another segment of an inch, so that Peter can kiss him. 

It’s a very safe kiss, a very sweet one. Close-mouthed, which is no torture at all, really, with a mouth like Stiles’s. Delicately curved. Too pretty for a man, most would think. Too pretty by half. It isn’t difficult at all to bestow a kiss, or two, when Stiles is made for them. When he _blossoms_ under them, clenches his hands in the fabric of Peter’s nightshirt, fingers working quick and clever. 

Peter starts, though, when they wander to the skin at the collar. The scars.

Stiles inhales quickly. Not quite a gasp. Not enough air for a gasp, Peter thinks, and strokes the curve of Stiles’s cheek. ”It’s all right,” Peter says, though in truth it might be the farthest thing from all right. “They don’t hurt,” and that isn’t a lie. He doesn’t feel much of anything, usually.

“You don’t mind?” Stiles asks, but he’s already running his hands up Peter’s neck, the edge of his scalp, to where the hair grew in curly and soft as a child’s. Something of a vanity, he can admit. It’s a fool’s vanity, to grow it long, and not even have the decency to use it to hide his scars. 

But Peter isn’t a decent man. He’s never claimed to be, and he certainly can’t now. He has a seventeen year old boy between his thighs, innocent, untouched as morning dew before he came to Peter’s bed, and Peter thinks not about kissing, but about biting. About circling the rosebud nipple pushing out against Stiles nightshirt. Peter wants to pinch it, desperately, worry it with his teeth and between his fingers, nipped through spit-soaked cloth. 

And so the next kiss is full of teeth, the dull pain of them; then the lash of Peter’s tongue to soothe it. Stiles makes a noise; unmistakably pleasurable, as quick as he tries to stifle it, and next Peter bites down on Stiles’s upper lip, rakes his teeth over the chapped skin, even as Stiles’s mouth tries to press against his. Even as Stiles tries to match him pain for pain and pleasure for pleasure, until Stiles is squirming in Peter’s lap, until Peter burns with the ache of it.

“Oh,” Stiles says, a shuddering little moan he tries to mask against Peter’s mouth. He bites at the corner of it instead, the plumy mess of burn scars, and then seems to change his mind. Lets his mouth rest there gently. Not quite what Peter would call a kiss. He doesn’t call it anything, and he barely breathes, until Stiles settles backwards.

“Is that… okay?” Stiles asks, and Peter must kiss him, _must_ ; one hand on either side of Stiles’s face, pushing at his jaw, wrenching his mouth open so Peter can lick inside, and taste.

“My dear boy,” Peter says, stroking the thin skin of Stiles’s eyelids, wiping away the moisture there. You are so very lovely, he wants to say, but Stiles is entirely unaware of his charms. Peter wants to outline the things he wants to do to Stiles - a terrifyingly inclusive list, with perhaps ‘terrifying’ having most of the emphasis, at present. He strokes the lines of Stiles’s face instead, fields a slightly clumsy kiss - Stiles has no hair to speak of; cut utilitarian-short, it can be difficult to guide him - and pulls Stiles in until their bodies are flush against one another. Only the nightshirts between them, though when Peter reaches for the hem of Stiles’s, he balks.

“Take yours off too,” Stiles says, and ‘too’ sounds like ‘first.’ Not quite a command - a bargain? “It’s only fair,” he continues, not quite looking Peter in the face. Eyes darting from the corner of his mouth to the tangle of hair that peeks out from the collar of Peter’s shirt. One hand on Peter’s shoulder, and the other dangerously close to where the nightshirt hits his thigh.

Peter thinks, momentarily, about refusing. About reaching up under Stiles’s nightshirt and taking his cock in hand. Stroking Stiles to completion with a slick palm, and Peter’s teeth set in Stiles’s neck. It’s been a long time since anyone saw Peter naked - longer still before he was unscarred. But Peter isn’t the blushing virgin in this scenario, is he? And the blushing virgin is too delightful to pass up, for whatever the reason.

“All right,” Peter says. Voice pitched low, and soothing. Not unlike talking to a skittish horse, and he kisses Stiles again. Thumb running over the thin jut of his collarbone.  
When they are both stripped, Peter can drink in the sight of Stiles before him. The lithesome body, lightly muscled, covered with the slightest patches of hair; the darkest of it trailing from Stiles’s bellybutton to the thatch of curls at the apex of Stiles’s thighs. Peter itches to run his hands through them. For all that Stiles is staring at Peter, he doesn’t seem to realize the way Peter is staring back - greedy, and obvious. An old man’s gaze, a lech’s, caught up in the flower of youth that will never be his again. Only able to possess it second hand, to drink it in, to drown himself in it.

It can’t be the first male body Stiles has ever seen, but possibly, Peter thinks with some amusement, it is the oldest - a sprinkling of grey hair amidst the darker on Peter’s chest, the breadth of shoulder that only comes with time. But Peter is an active man, still. His stable of horses is well-used, and he is muscled enough that he has never felt ashamed of it, to think that he was lesser than any man. But Stiles stares at Pete with a frankness that belies innocence, or perhaps speaks of it - no one would stare like that if they didn’t know exactly what would happen afterwards.

“Stiles,” Peter says, and Stiles’s gaze snaps to Peter’s face. He is flushed - subtly different from the blush of earlier. His cock standing up almost awkwardly between his legs; hard, dark with blood, and Peter thinks about taking it into his mouth. Of making Stiles pale with the pleasure of it, the tease of him bitter across Peter’s tongue.

“Come here,” Peter says, pulling Stiles towards him once more, and the noise Stiles makes when he sprawls across Peter’s thighs, when his cock touches the warm skin of Peter’s stomach, is nearly indescribable. Peter couldn’t repeat it, he’s sure - not in a million years, not with a thousand lovers. A breathy thing, beautiful in its parity, in the edge of the moan that could be behind it.

“I’m- ” Stiles stutters, stumbles over the words. Blush like a fever on his face, and creeping down. Another thing Peter would like to follow with his mouth, from the pink of Stiles’s cheek to the bright red of his mouth, the splotches on his neck and chest, trying to pull the blood to the surface with his teeth and tongue, the suction of his mouth, and the heat. He is desperate to leave his mark on Stiles’s body, to claim him before something other than God and county. Something older, more primal. He wants Stiles’s blood on his tongue. Not precisely the type of blood normally spilled in on a honeymoon, perhaps, but Peter has never claimed to be conventional.

It seems prudent to spend more time kissing Stiles; to settle him with soft touches and sweet words. He grumbles at them, he blushes, but he never says _stop_.

“Darling boy,” Peter croons, and Stiles shivers. Peter licks the palm of Stiles hand, runs his thumb over the pulse point of Stiles’s wrist and tastes the salt sweat over his tongue. Memorizing him. There’s only one first time, after all, and they nearly had none at all.

It’s a blessing, a silver lining of thing that Stiles is already prepped from before, slick with oil; it takes only a moment for Peter to hold him open, to tease himself just inside, and watch Stiles’s face.

“Oh,” Stiles says, and then again - “oh,” just the faintest edge of desperation, or panic, and Peter pushes forward, another inch. “Fuck, it’s - ”

“Still thinking of England?” Peter asks, and Stiles is startled into laughing, a burst of it that jerks his stomach, his hips up towards the ceiling. He clenches around Peter, muscles rippling - the feeling is exquisite, and Peter wonders, for a moment, why he hasn’t had more lovers that laugh. He’s only beginning to understand the price of the boy under him, the wonders he might have inside.

“Hold still,” he says. “Relax,” and Stiles pulls a face that explains exactly how difficult he might find that. Peter rolls his hips, slowly, and Stiles makes another choked off little sound. Clutches at Peter’s forearms with long fingers, long hands, scrapping little nails digging into the soft skin there.

Peter shushes him, softly, and watches his cock disappear into Stiles, one long gentle thrust, as gentle as Peter’s ever done anything, or ever could. Much gentler than he wants, and even that causes Stiles to wail out a blue streak, a broken bit of French on the end. 

“Does it hurt?” he asks, and watches Stiles’s face screw up, watches him suck on his bottom lip like he’s trying to soothe himself. Like he doesn’t know how to answer the question.

“Don’t stop,” Stiles says, eventually. Not quite an answer to the question, but Peter doesn’t.

Peter takes his time easing back out again. Goes slowly. Slick sounds in a near silent room. Each thrust back in yanking a sound out of Stiles, strangled or shocked or obscene, wet enough to be close to tears or composed of nothing but air; sometimes swearing, sometimes begging. Sometimes just Peter’s name. Sometimes just please.

And every time Stiles reaches down for his own cock - poor neglected thing, angry red - Peter brings the offending hand back up over Stiles’s head. Pins it there, a bruising tight grip. He likes the stretch of Stiles that way, the curve of his torso, that he tries to convince Peter otherwise - begging, cussing, fucking his tongue into Peter’s mouth - but never out right asking. Peter thinks about tying Stiles down, later. That would frustrate Stiles, he imagines; gagging him might frustrate him more, but something about that doesn’t seem particularly appealing to Peter. He likes the sounds Stiles makes too much.

Somewhere along the line it becomes less of a fuck and more of a writhe, a strange symbiosis, a confusion as to where Stiles’s body ended and Peter’s body began. Somehow simultaneous, not mirrored but echoed. Peter lies on top of Stiles, presses him down into the bed, their legs entwined, mouths against each other, a blur of kissing and moans, of putting his mouth to the hot skin of Stiles’s face, the soft and scented curve of his neck.

“Oh,” Stiles says, clawing at Peter’s back, the scarred and unscarred sides alike, and how did Peter ever think Stiles was the type to lie back, to grin and bear it? “ _please_ ,” and in the next breath he swears at Peter, curses him out, asks to come, for Peter to fuck him harder. Squeezes his supple legs around Peter and pulls him in.

It’s a torture, oh, a sweet one, and even Peter can’t keep it up forever. Isn’t inhuman. When he reaches down and grabs hold of Stiles, the hard length of him - hot enough to feel like burning, the head sticky with precome, slick enough when Peter slides his thumb over it - Stiles keens, high-pitched and pained, flexing in Peter’s hand, desperate for attention.

“Oh,” Peter says, “Sweet boy,” and fists Stiles’s cock; revels in it, rides out the hard jerk of Stiles’s hips. Shoves into the _clench_ of him, so frenzied with the need to come he forgets how sore he is. Stiles is a sweet, broken mess; it’s the first time his mouth had stopped moving, the first time Peter has ever seen him quiet, really, and that _would_ go straight to Peter’s cock. When Stiles comes, sobbing, spurting out against his own stomach, over Peter’s fist, his whole body goes soft and loose, heavy. Pliant. Legs fallen open and shivery. It’s only a moment until Peter comes, long and hard, a hurtful spasm of his hips, and he grits his teeth and fucks through it, shoving his come deeper into Stiles’s body, until the pull of Stiles around him is pain with the faintest wrung-out pleasure.

Peter collapses next to Stiles on the bed, arms gone shaky and weak, sore to the pit of his stomach. Stiles is fucked out next to him, breathing gone shallow and hoarse. Not one sound, and Peter presses his face against Stiles’s, open mouth to open mouth. Tongue flicking out to tease the swell of Stiles’s lips, to retexture his chapped skin. Stiles’s moan is encouraging. Pleased. Faintly burred. 

After a moment Peter picks one of the nightshirts up off the floor - Peter and Stiles are of one size, really; as long as Peter doesn’t have to walk back to his own room naked - and wipes them as clean as the lamplight would allow. Stiles’s inner thighs are sticky, semen and oil, sweat, and he shivers when Peter goes to wipe them clean.

Stiles stays quiet. Gone restless, wriggling slightly against the sheets. 

“All right?” Peter asks, and while Stiles nods, he also worries his lip. Another kiss then, Peter thinks. It’s remarkable, how far a kiss will go; how far it’s taken them. Stiles is built for kisses, isn’t he - not just the shape of his mouth, but their easy affection, their whiplash switch from sweet to sexual, their infinite possibilities. Peter could kiss Stiles a thousand times and linger on a thousand flavors.

“Stay,” Stiles says, a whisper of a breath across Peter’s lips, and then - while Peter is still floundering, momentarily, wondering if he should tell Stiles about the night terrors that come, sometimes - adds a please that would break a tyrant’s heart.

“Of course,” Peter concedes. The worst that could happen is waking up in a cold sweat. And no one sleeps heavier than a young boy after an orgasm. It’s been a while since Peter was one, or had one, really, but he remembers.

It takes more than a moment to become comfortable, for Peter to relax when Stiles’s hand traces the edges of scars he would prefer were not there at all; for Stiles to control his flyaway knees and elbows, sharp and selfish, the first time he’s ever slept next to anyone, ever. They might yet grow into each other, Peter thinks. Or Stiles will grow, at least, while Peter withers. Becomes old next to him. Less than Stiles deserves, perhaps, but Peter can be a good husband. Was once, and will be, to Stiles. Will learn the whole of him, all the parts, all the hidden and underneath things.

In the morning they frot up against one another, sweet and slow, tacky with the remains of sweat and come, until they get restless and Peter calls for a bath, a big brass tub of a thing, enough for two people if you don’t mind your legs all tangled together, and they don’t mind. Stiles is caught up in the first blush of sex, and Peter is - Peter is unused to kindness, lately; at least the sort of kindness that isn’t tinged with pity, or duty. He has a husband, now, he has a _Stiles_ , a most peculiar thing, it would seem, and they’re newlyweds, aren’t they? Is it so bad if they aren’t yet ready to face the rest of the world? That Peter would keep the two of them here. 

Peter fucks Stiles in that tub, of course; harder than he has yet. Harder than Stiles might be ready for - hard enough to make him sore afterwards, to lie in the dirtied water with Peter pressed against his back, his mouth at Stiles’s ear. Hard enough that the water sloshes against the brass sides, spilling onto the floor, and Stiles will be too tired to even feel embarrassed about it later, about the mess of the room, the fact that everyone in the household knows what they’ve been up to in more than necessary detail.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Plus, Married Life!
> 
> Over the next few days, when they manage to drag themselves out of bed, Peter shows Stiles his new home - the stables, the libraries, a little of the forest. Stiles is a clever thing; he isn’t the type to show it off, but Peter picks it up easily enough. He remembers, he thinks, that Stiles had been educated well - the last vestiges of his mother’s class - but it’s more than speaking Latin, or reading Greek. Peter has never seen a quicker mind, or a deeper (if capricious) focus. Stiles snaps on, like a light, though with a charming irregularity. Not dependable, in the strictest sense of the word, but when Peter is forced to return back to his work, he sets Stiles loose on some of his backburner projects, those unfortunate extra little things Peter always means to make time for but never actually gets around to. It gives Stiles a bit of structure, things to fill the hours besides writing letters and reading and riding horses, which - Stiles kind of thinks horses were created by the devil specifically to torture him, so that’s more of an Intense Boredom activity.
> 
> After a few weeks the Sheriff comes to visit them, because - frankly, the whole idea of the marriage was a mess, and John’s alone now, and Stiles is away from him, and that’s just everything Not Right. He has to see. He has to make sure Stiles is alright, though what John will do if he’s not, no one knows. Possibly great violence. He has the capacity.
> 
> So John gets to Hale Hall - it’s close but not too close, you can’t just pop in whenever you feel like it - and the thing is… it looks kind of like it’s working out? Like. What in the world. Peter treats Stiles like he’s got kid gloves on - not like he thinks Stiles is a delicate piece of glass, no, but like - like a miracle someone left on your doorstep to find in the morning, and you’re afraid will wisp away in the morning sun. And Stiles, in contrast, holds nothing of himself back around Peter; not like when he was in school, or in polite society, when he toned himself down and tucked himself away. They don’t act like newlyweds, exactly, and it would be silly for them to pretend they were originally any sort of love match, but John might see something better.
> 
> And when the Sheriff heads back home everyone is waiting for him there - the McCalls, the Argents, Lydia, Isaac, even Jackson, pretending to be disinterested - because they couldn’t all go at once, could they? They have to retain some semblance of propriety, and now they need to hear what’s going to happen, in case they all need to take turns rotating through visits to Hale Hall, to give Stiles company, and possibly to poison his husband’s tea. It’s not that Stiles hasn’t written them, but Stiles is definitely the guy who would put on his Brave Little Toaster face and pretend that everyone was working out fine, no matter what was happening. He cannot be trusted. Not with himself.
> 
> The Sheriff can’t even say anything right off the bat, just smiles. “I think they might be in love.”
> 
> And everyone is silent for a moment, until Scott pipes up, “but that’s… good, right?” and his mother and Lydia roll their eyes, and Isaac is beaming, AND I’M NOT SAYING IT ISN’T A LITTLE FUCKED UP BUT EVERYONE IS HAPPY THE END.
> 
>  
> 
> The next chapter is not!fic of Derek and Isaac in this 'verse.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Derek and Isaac's story,
> 
> Complete not!fic, please read only if you can stand to listen to me babble.

Derek runs off from home because he feels guilty as hell for living through the fire - for being out carousing with Kate Argent when nearly everyone in his family died. He waits around until Peter is back up on his feet, because he’s weirdly responsible, in his guilt, and then he’s off. Trying to Not Think, trying to lose himself any way he can. He drinks, he gambles - he loses and wins large sums of money, he takes ridiculous bets, dangerous dares, and always comes out full-bodied on the other side, and he begins to think he can’t die, not a blessing but a curse. and I don’t know what happens, exactly - maybe Peter writes about his marriage to Stiles, or maybe Derek really does get a close call that spooks him, or we could have a The Secret Garden style haunting where Laura shows up in Derek’s dreams like, “you knucklehead, _go back home _,” but that’s what Derek does.__

__And in the beginning, he and Stiles get along like cats and dogs, okay, like wet cats and miserable dogs that have the mange. Derek is not entirely convinced that Stiles’s family didn’t strong-arm Peter into this - family honor is kind of a thing with the Hales - and objectively speaking, Stiles is kind of young and pretty, if you like that sort of thing; and Derek comes back surly and unwashed and probably wearing two days of stubble, and at first Stiles brushes it off, whatever, but it’s DEREK, so he’s kind of always like that. And they spend a lot of time circling around each other, sizing the other up, before kind of retreating to their corners like… okay, whatever. Peter appears to be pretty enamored with Stiles and not entirely coo-coo crazy, like, buying him loads of diamonds crazy; and Derek is going to inherit Hale Hall after Peter dies, and become the next Lord of Whatever, so it’s not like Stiles can really make the case that Derek doesn’t belong here. Like, he _could_ , but that’s sort of a dick move, making your husband’s last remaining relative move away just because you don’t like him, and Stiles really is not that kind of asshole._ _

__One night Stiles and Peter are in bed, and Stiles is like “so your nephew is really hot. But he’s kind of a _dick_ ,” totally disgruntled, and Peter laughs, because he can see that Stiles and Derek are too fiercely protective of him to really see one another yet._ _

__And then IT ALL CHANGES when Isaac comes to visit Stiles. I think everyone back in Beacon Hills comes around fairly regularly - they take turns - its Isaac’s turn, now; maybe Erica and Boyd come with him, although of course Isaac gets to play not-awkward-totally-used-to-this fourth wheel. I think in this ‘verse he and Stiles are closer, because they both weren’t paired off the way Scott &Allison, Erica&Boyd, and Lydia&Jackson are. They wouldn’t maybe have become really good friends on their own, but when you’re both single people in a group of married friends, its kind of a necessity. _ _

__SO. Isaac comes to visit, and Derek ends up falling for him. Falling HARD, because he wasn’t expecting it, and then he spends a lot of time denying it, and that only makes it worse in the long run. Because Derek has HELLA ISSUES about letting people in, and communicating, and admitting he has feelings in general, much less talking about them._ _

__And Isaac initially presents as this scared little lamb, because his father was still an abusive drunk (sorry Isaac, you are my favorite woobie); with his curly hair falling everywhere, his big doe eyes, the exceedingly soft, pleasing timbre of his voice. He grew up trying to please, and even though the McCalls and Stilinkskis were eventually able to help him, protect him, and get him away from his father, there are some things that you never forget. Habits you can’t quite break yourself of. In a nutshell, Isaac _projects_ a kind of helpless vulnerability that draws Derek in, but underneath there’s a crazy-insane core of unbreakable steel that intrigues Derek enough that he might never leave Isaac alone._ _

__Isaac, meanwhile, it just as enamored, because A) Derek looks like Derek, hello, Isaac is kind of bowled over with wanting to climb him like a tree and B) Derek has moments of amazing, if succinct, eloquence when you get him alone and almost cornered (“you’ll never stop running”), when he _has_ to say something, not to mention that C), he spends his time lurking around the house and property much the same way Isaac does, and eventually they start to lurk together - sitting quietly in front of a fire in the library, riding the horses through the surrounding forest. They rarely talk, but there’s a kind of peace between them that means more than all the words in the world._ _

__And there’s kind of some Pride and Prejudice shit where Stiles is all “Derek? YOU LIKE DEREK? ISAAAC NO,” because the only Derek he knows is kind of an asshole, okay, he’s spent the last five years drinking and whoring his way through the Continent and made all his money gambling and doing really stupid things, this is THE OPPOSITE of someone who would be good for Isaac. And Stiles is a good friend, and generally such a good judge of character that Isaac can’t really get up the nerve to say that he likes talking with Derek, late at night, when Peter and Stiles have already retired. He feels safe with Derek, like he could curl up next to him and stay there, and Isaac barely feels that with anyone. It took years to be comfortable around Scott, and it wasn’t like this._ _

__Cue TRAGIC MISUNDERSTANDINGS where Isaac withdraws from Derek, maybe, because he can’t take the chance of falling more in love with him; or even rejecting him almost outright, though Derek does not do it Darcy-proposing-style, because Derek is totally not that dude. Derek might just hint that he’ll be heading away from Hale Hall again, unless he has a reason to stay. And Isaac purses his lips and looks away, because he can’t be that reason._ _

__I don’t know exactly what happens next - Isaac heads back to Beacon Hills, because he’s been at Hale Hall long enough; and if Stiles thought Derek was a Grumpy McMoodypants before, the only thing he does now is BROOD. ALL BROODING, ALL THE TIME. EXCEPT WHEN HE’S GROWLING. and finally Stiles throws up his hands like OH MY GOD, FINE, YOU LOVE ISAAC, WE GET IT, and writes Isaac a letter where he’s all _I was wrong, I was wrong, I was SO wrong, please come collect Derek, for the love of God_ , and Isaac shows up at Hale Hall with his Brave Little Toaster face on, ready to do battle, and when Derek sees him he has one of those flash-break moments of vulnerability, where everything is on his face, and Isaac is just like “fuck it” and throws himself at Derek, Derek’s arms coming up around him immediately, and from some high vantage point Stiles is simultaneously wringing his hands and cooing._ _

__OR Derek goes back off on another one of his crazy drinking, gambling, betting binges, only - there’s nothing to it. Not that there was _much_ to it, before, but he knows, deep down, there’s somewhere else he’d rather be. So he goes to Beacon Hills, to Isaac’s house, and knocks on his door, even though he looks like ten miles of bad road, even though he thinks he knows what Isaac’s answer is going to be. He knocks, and he sits in Isaac’s front room until Isaac can dredge up the courage to see him, and Derek pours out his tortured little heart, all Darcy’s-tortured-second-proposal style, and Isaac doesn’t even think about the answer, yes yes yes._ _

__And they move into Hale Hall, or maybe a smaller property that Peter/Derek owns, though they spend a lot of time abroad, because Derek kind of got used to the roaming and Isaac’s never been anywhere, really; Derek likes showing it to Isaac, likes seeing the world with new eyes. and then of course one day when they’re all back at Hale Hall Stiles is like, “wow, t his kind of makes me your step-uncle, how creepy is that,” and Isaac makes a face just like this :O and then they drink heavily__


End file.
